Golden Globe® Award nominee Jennifer Love Hewitt will star in and executive produce Lifetime’s new original one-hour series The Client List. Based on the network’s hit 2010 original movie, The Client List will launch on Lifetime in 2012 with 10 episodes. In addition, the network has entered into a first look development deal for both series and movies with Hewitt’s production company Fedora Films, it was announced today by Nancy Dubuc, President and General Manager of Lifetime Networks. Hewitt’s deal also includes her directing a future movie for the network.
The Client List is about a Texas housewife (Hewitt), who, after being deserted by her husband, is left in deep financial straits and takes a job at a seemingly traditional day spa in a neighboring town. When she realizes massages aren’t the only services on the menu, she quickly grabs the opportunity to relieve her financial hardships by partnering with the parlor’s feisty and disorganized owner to run the business. The series will follow her as she delicately balances two starkly different lives — one as a single mom in a conservative town struggling to provide for her family and the other as a savvy and ambitious businesswoman working with a rowdy, sexy and unpredictable group of women.
Attached as executive producers on The Client List are Hewitt, Dannielle Thomas, Howard Braunstein, Michael Jaffe, AJ Rinella and Jordan Budde (Good Christian Belles, 90210), with Fedora Films producing.
Regarding the announcement, Dubuc said, “Beloved by viewers, Jennifer Love Hewitt is an amazing talent on and off the screen and we are very excited about continuing our relationship with her on The Client List. This project falls in line with our strategy to expand Lifetime’s slate with unapologetic programming that will surprise audiences.”
“I am thrilled to be working with the fantastic team at Lifetime again,” said Hewitt. “Jordan Budde has written a show that truly reflects the spirit of the movie and I am looking forward to an amazing partnership with Lifetime as both a producer and actress. After hearing Lifetime’s vision for the new direction of the network, as well as the amazing level of talent they are working with, I knew I wanted to partner with them in making quality television.”
In its July 2010 world premiere, the Lifetime Original Movie The Client List, for which Hewitt received a Golden Globe nomination in the Best Performance by an Actress in a Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television category, averaged 3.9 million Total Viewers. The movie was produced by Fedora Films and Jaffe-Braunstein Entertainment (Lifetime’s The Hunt for the I-5 Killer, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, Bond of Silence, Double Wedding).
Most recently, Hewitt appeared in the drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and sitcom Hot in Cleveland, and produced and starred opposite Betty White in the highly-rated CBS TV movie The Lost Valentine. She will next be seen in the independent feature, “Café,” opening in Los Angeles on August 19th. She’s currently shooting the feature comedy Jewtopia, based on the critically acclaimed off-Broadway play. Prior to The Client List, Hewitt portrayed “Melinda Gordon” on the hit drama series, The Ghost Whisperer, in which she played a young woman who delivers messages from the dead to the living. (Hewitt also served as a producer on the series and directed a number of episodes.) Her first book, The Day I Shot Cupid, published by Hyperion, quickly became a New York Times best-seller. Hewitt has amassed numerous feature film credits throughout her career. She starred in Twentieth Century Fox’s live action/CGI features, Garfield and Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties; the DreamWorks action/comedy The Tuxedo, opposite Jackie Chan; MGM’s Heartbreakers, with Sigourney Weaver, Gene Hackman and Ray Liotta; I Know What You Did Last Summer, for which she won a Blockbuster Entertainment Award and the film’s sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer; as well as the comedies Can’t Hardly Wait and The Suburbans. Hewitt also starred in two independent features, The Truth about Love and If Only, which she produced with her production company Fedora Films. She received critical acclaim as the title role in the ABC Original Movie The Audrey Hepburn Story, based on the life of the iconic Academy Award?-winning actress. Hewitt is also known to television audiences as “Sarah Reeves” from the award-winning drama series Party of Five.
(Soruce: Lifetime)
